By Charles Badger

After eight years of Cindy Sheehan, Code Pink, Congressmen arrested outside embassies, and other anti-war, anti-globalization, anti- Bush protests, it was easy to get the impression that liberals love to protest. It seems like the Saul Alinsky way-”How to Be an Activist 101.” You have to cause a scene, right? Wrong.  Now Democrats tell us a citizen being disruptive is suspect. Good citizens don’t engage in collective action to make their voices heard to their elected officials. Such outbursts, we are told, can only be explained by the existence of outside forces instigating, funding, and inciting citizens to action.

For proof, one need only look to the recent proliferation of protests at Congressional town-halls. Keith Oberman and Rachel Maddow dismissed those participating are “fake protestors.” Nancy Pelosi called them “Astroturf” and Barbara Boxer said they were too “well-dressed” to be authentic. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said no “real citizen” would heckle. And several news outlets and commentators repeatedly insist that some unspecified number of these protestors (they never say how many) aren’t from the district represented by the Congressman they’re heckling. The DNC leads the charge on that one. These “grassroots protests” their recent memo asserts-with ‘grassroots’ in sardonic quotation marks-”are being organized and largely paid for by Washington special interests and insurance companies.”

Upon hearing this I couldn’t help but note the parallel between these assertions and those recently put forth by President Ahmadinejad of Iran about his own domestic unrest. Throughout the post-election uprising in his country Ahmadinejad has had one consistent refrain: the West is behind it. Those aren’t really protestors in the streets, Ahmadinejad insists. Rather, they are puppets of Western governments, propagandized by Western media, and instigated by the CIA.

So, too, when American Democrats are faced with protests, such as these and the Tea Parties earlier this year, their solution is to discredit the protestors. We are told these are “fake” citizens biologically engineered in laboratories funded by Big Business and planted by “Right Wing” corporate interests.

But a still more salient contrast struck me upon reflecting on this “fake protestors” assertion. Ahmadinejad wasn’t the first leader to attribute popular movements of citizens to “meddling” outside forces. Indeed, every leader throughout time pursuing an agenda counter to the wishes of the people trots out this stale, hackneyed charge. At the height of the American Civil Rights Movement we saw precisely this assertion parroted by every Southern segregationist mayor and governor. “Northern agitators!” they railed. They were behind the sit-ins and marches and voter registration drives. “We know how to handle our ‘nigras’ here,” Alabama Governor George Wallace remarked. “Those agitators up North don’t know anything about the folks here.”

Hoyer, Boxer, Oberman, and crew sound like Southern mayors in 1960 saying: “Movement? What movement? All the Negroes are happy here.” This deranged delusion led them to convince themselves that segregation would last “today…tomorrow…and forever” as, George Wallace famously proclaimed. Just as the out-of-touch demagogues of the Jim Crow South and today’s tyrannical Iran prove themselves woefully unable to detect a genuine popular movement afoot in their midst, so too, today’s Democratic leaders are fast barreling down a course toward the same fate.

Each time Democrats insist we trust them instead of our “lying eyes” watching images of their constituents staging an overthrow of their power, they continue to demonstrate how clueless they are. It represents both a spirit of hubris and a state of denial-the ingredients which always precede a great fall. Happy midterm elections, Dems!

Charles Badger is sophomore at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. He was a White House Intern in the summer of 2008, appointed McCain campaign Youth Co-Chairman for Kentucky for the 2008 election and serves as Vice-Chairman of the Kentucky Federation of College Republicans. Charles also works on issues of juvenile crime and prison reform as an appointee of the Governor to the Kentucky Juvenile Justice Advisory Board. At Berea, Charles chairs the campus chapter of College Republicans, is Editor-In-Chief of the student newspaper, and Speaker of the Student Government Association Senate. Charles was born in Queens, New York and now lives in Nashville, TN.